On Monday, January 26, Associations of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (hereon ACAMS) held its Third Annual AML Risk Management Conference at The Conrad Hotel in downtown New York. Over the course of this week, summaries and takeaways from the key notes and panel discussions will be shared in this blog.

William Langford, Moderator, Global Head of Compliance Architecture and Strategy, Citigroup

This panel discussion, the final for the conference, was a well-rounded compliance function discussion. Compliance department has a lot of roles: adviser, monitor, surveillance, investigation, risk mitigation, oversight and control, and regulatory relations. The focus of this panel was monitoring, surveillance and investigation. Both Martin Cunningham and Justin Bogert have military intelligence backgrounds. Cunningham is at a traditional financial institution and Bogert is at a money services business (MSB). Many of the issues are the same but the institutions differing in two main ways, in terms of compliance:

MSB’s collect far less information during onboarding a client, and

MSB’s have more issues pertaining to charities being abused for money laundering or terror financing.

Paypal silos risk into three buckets: Brand Risk, Fraud Risk and Transaction Risk. Traditional anti-money laundering program development are utilized to research typology. Special effort is made to collect information as transactions, both financial and non-financial, take place on Paypal’s platform to create risk profiles. Paypal has developed an internal visualization tool to find relationships.

Standard Chartered Bank is highly exposed to developing economies. For this reason, geo-political expertise is highly valued. SCB’s AML teams are made up of four groups of people: Law Enforcement, Intelligence, Bankers and Trade/Tool personnel. Law Enforcement are good at documentation and analysis of the collected information. Intelligence are good at bringing outside information in to provide context. Bankers bring institutional knowledge about how the organization reacts to transactions and relationships. Trade and Tools personnel provide execution expertise in both preventing and investigating crimes.

About the Author: Marcus Maltempo is a compliance professional with more than a decade of experience helping banks, law firms and clients manage investigations and regulatory responses.
He tweets @MoneyCompliance